In the media

According to Ofqual, the exam regulator for England, over 4,300 candidates were penalised over cheating this year during A-level and GCSE exams. 2,000 candidates caught in possession of a mobile phone were given mark reductions, while about 1,500 students received warnings. Moreover 800 candidates were penalised by having their exam voided. Ofqual also published its report into the conduct of the 2022 exam series, which noted that 14 schools and colleges reported cyberattacks aimed at accessing exam administration software or student work.

Egerton University Vice-Chancellor and eight University Council members have received a 30-day jail term following their failure to implement a court order directing them to pay the lecturers 100% of their salaries. Egerton University Academic Staff Union (UASU) Chapter had filed for contempt after the university imposed a 40% pay cut in 2020 allegedly as a stop-gap measure at the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the Council failed to produce evidence of the necessity of this measure.

The Sindh education department dismissed eight teachers at different public schools over their absence from their jobs for the past two years. Although they had been living abroad, they kept drawing salaries from their institutions. The education officers are trying to identify more ghost teachers to improve the education system in Sindh.

The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency received 385 referrals about contract cheating in the first half of 2022, compared with 138 in 2021 and 21 in 2020. Cheating is becoming an “arms race”, and it ranges from students visiting cheating sites to have just one question answered, to paying ghost-writers to complete an entire subject. According to a professor in academic integrity, a new weapon in this race is artificial intelligence, which generates essays almost from scratch or answers problems with the right prompt.

Headteachers and university lecturers are concerned that ChatGPT, which can provide convincing human-sounding answers to exam questions, could spark a wave of cheating in homework and exam coursework. Users can ask questions ranging from simple factual queries to absurd requests and receive coherent responses written in natural English. The output of ChatGPT hasn’t triggered any conventional plagiarism detectors since the text it produces hasn’t been written before, leaving assessors struggling to work out how to identify cheaters.